


Do No Harm

by echoinautumn (maybetwice)



Category: Star Trek: Alternate Original Series (Movies)
Genre: Alien Technology, Angst, Body Horror, Death, Drama, Forced Pregnancy, Knifeplay, M/M, Medical Experimentation, Medical Horrors, Mirror Universe, Mpreg, Rape/Non-con Elements, Themed Story, Torture, alien torture
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-26
Updated: 2013-05-26
Packaged: 2017-12-13 01:56:31
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/818604
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maybetwice/pseuds/echoinautumn
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Leonard McCoy gave up everything to get away and join Starfleet, and he’s been keeping his faith in Jim Kirk since then. He’s still not sure what he’s gained in exchange.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Do No Harm

**Author's Note:**

> Fill for [this prompt](http://community.livejournal.com/issenterprise/56034.html?thread=663266#t663266) at the [](http://issenterprise.livejournal.com/profile)[**issenterprise**](http://issenterprise.livejournal.com/) kink meme, which I started while my computer was out of commission and never picked up again. Thanks to [](http://yeomanrand.livejournal.com/profile)[](http://yeomanrand.livejournal.com/)**yeomanrand** for a great prompt!

_I swear by Apollo, the healer, Asclepius, Hygieia, and Panacea, and I take to witness all the gods, all the goddesses, to keep according to my ability and my judgment, the following Oath and agreement:_

*

_To consider dear to me, as my parents, him who taught me this art; to live in common with him and, if necessary, to share my goods with him; To look upon his children as my own brothers, to teach them this art._

*

Starfleet was a different world from the one he'd been living in, brutal as it had been. Leonard had known that well before he'd boarded the shuttle to San Francisco with a flask of his father's bourbon in his pocket and a knife in his belt to keep the most ambitious of the new cadets well away from him. Starfleet sure as hell wasn't Georgia and it wasn't Ole Miss with its yearly hazing, but he wasn't naïve to that when he signed his life away and boarded the shuttle. He was a doctor and the Empire needed doctors more than they needed the thousands of recruits with designs on their own ships. It was a safe career choice; one that would keep him alive in the only organization that would let him keep practicing medicine. The rest of the Empire liked to pretend that they upheld oaths and honor, and only Starfleet was honest enough not to hide that they were oathbreakers like the rest of the Terran race.

He made an old promise when he became a doctor, more tradition than actual reflection of what doctors did in his day and age. It wasn't the old days. This was the _Empire_ , and he had more power than the Emperor if he was in the right place at the right time. The Emperor had power over hundreds of planets and more space than he'd ever visit in his lifetime or the lifetimes of his children, but Leonard McCoy had the power of life and death in his hands, in his brain and every blossom of nerves in his body, and he'd abused the power to break his promise, his oath, and for what? Revenge wasn’t as sweet for him.

He'd never killed a man, no, not then; not yet. He wasn't too far gone, though he'd spent three hours in his office staring at the vial of poison on his desk before he knocked it into the incinerator and went home hours earlier than his wife had expected, knowing what he’d find there when he did.

It would have been easier than he'd thought it would be. Three weeks after he failed to kill the man in his bed with his wife, Leonard McCoy, M.D. left it all behind: wife and daughter and every oath-bound responsibility that held him to Georgia and Earth. Just as easily, he made another oath.

This time, there was someone to hold him to it.

*

_I will prescribe regimens for the good of my patients according to my ability and my judgment and never do harm to anyone._

*

If anyone intended to survive Starfleet Academy, they had to be smart, or strong, or extremely observant. Leonard was two of the three, and he'd be damned if he ever let anyone _there_ figure out which he wasn’t. The kid he'd met on the shuttle from Riverside had seemed none of the three, not when he dropped into the seat next to Leonard with good cheer and a taunting grin at the rest of the cadets on board. Within hours, Leonard already knew better than to cross Jim Kirk, and not just from the dark bruises littered all over the bitter, brooding cadets sharing the shuttle to San Francisco with them.

“I need a favor, Bones,” Jim drawled smoothly when he strode into his surgery, the one Leonard fought tooth and nail for just so he could be treated like a doctor and not another rat, another useless cadet, until Starfleet beat them all into useful officers for the Empire. “That’s not a request, by the way. I need it.”

Leonard looked up at him bitterly and crossed his arms, having already promised himself that he could do better than this; he didn’t need to stoop to gathering favor among the strongest of the cadets, the ones who had already risen above the others. “I don’t know why you came to me.”

“Because you’re the one that can do it,” Jim told him and when his eyes, the color and intensity of a phaser blast, locked on Leonard, he already knew there was nothing he could do but listen and hold on for his life.

“I don’t do favors,” Leonard interrupted immediately, unwilling to let him get any further than that before it was much too late to stop himself from being sucked into Jim Kirk’s scheming, the man who was somehow explosion and vortex wrapped up in a neat package with a killer smile. It was too late then, he already knew it was, and so he turned toward him and loosened his arms, “Not unless you’ve got something to make it worth it.”

“Good,” Jim breathed, smiling so widely that Leonard knows that he won’t like whatever Jim wants him to do. “You’re going to get a cadet in here tomorrow for a physical, name of Jacobs, and you’re going to give him _this._ ” He whirled around and dropped a hypospray on Leonard’s desk, clearly marked and plainly pulled straight from the shelves of the pharmacy. The vaccine for Klingon Augment Typhoid was totally harmless to any Terran who had never had it before, except that every cadet had been given a full round of vaccines during their entrance physical.

“Jesus Christ,” Leonard swore, before he could remember that things like that are forbidden here, the worst kind of invocation he could have used, a mark of his weaknesses that he believes in the impossible superstitions of dead Terran history. “That’s a damn dangerous and stupid idea if I’ve ever heard one. Damn it, Kirk, half the damn planet’s allergic to that shit in concentration. If it doesn’t kill him, it’ll send him into—”

“Anaphylaxis,” Jim supplied quietly, somehow grinning even more broadly when he picked it up and spun it through his fingers. “A lesson, that’s all. Jacobs won’t die from it. Something that dumb wouldn’t know to drop dead when it was supposed to.”

“I’m not your goddamn tool.” Leonard turned back toward the shelf behind him and swallowed, knowing it was futile. “I’m not doing it.”

“Your choice, Doctor McCoy,” Jim murmured, and the low tone of his voice carried through the air, as if he were breathing against Leonard’s ears instead of standing a full ten feet away. “I can promise that it will be worth your time to do this. Think what you could gain by working with me,” he continued, and when Leonard whipped around, saw Jim reach down for his PADD, left out on the desk next to the hateful hypospray, and flip through to his contacts. “And then think what you could lose.”

The soft chime from Jim’s PADD was all the confirmation Leonard needed to know that his contact list had just been exported, just as Jim set down his PADD again, right next to the hypospray.

“Good night, Bones.”

The next morning, when Jacobs showed up, looming and revoltingly arrogant as ever, Leonard didn’t think of the few contacts he’d kept in his PADD, what was left of his friends, his ex-wife, his _daughter_. He thought of Jim’s wicked grin and the promise of violence barely restrained in every one of his leonine movements, and when Jacobs collapsed two buildings over, Bones was there in the clinic, staring at an empty field for a KAT vaccination on Jacobs’s file that he needed to recheck, wondering what he could have possibly just gained.

*

_I will not give a lethal drug to anyone if I am asked, nor will I advise such a plan; and similarly I will not give a woman a pessary to cause an abortion._

*

“Kill it,” Jim ordered firmly and turned back toward the doors of sickbay. “Do it now, Bones.”

Leonard stared for a long time at McGivers’ prone body, at Sulu to her left and Hansen further down, at the slightest bulge of her abdomen, and threw his tricorder on the table next to her when he stalked off after Jim. “I’m not doing it,” he told him fiercely, as soon as he caught up to him. “I’m not. Those are babies, probably goddamn _Terran_ babies.”

“They’re parasites,” Jim corrected him, and Leonard felt his breath freeze in his lungs when he looked up at him. “They’re parasites inside my crew members, placed there by an alien race in a last ditch effort to find mercy in me and save their skins from destruction. Kill them, kill anyone who gets in your way, and if you question my authority again, Bones, I’ll make sure you get the next parasite, and no one will take it out of _you_ when that happens.”

He didn’t answer for a long time, burning with the indignity of Kirk’s request, but then Jim turned to look at him again, as if he’d forgotten something minor.

“Kill Hansen, too,” he added smoothly, “He disobeyed a direct order down there when he touched the artifact that infected the away team and endangered the entire ship.”

“Yes, sir,” Leonard answered immediately, and remembered that Jim had been on the away mission as well. “Jim, you—”

Jim didn’t respond at first but Leonard couldn’t stop his gaze from moving down, to the slightest bump in his shirt. “Come to my quarters when it’s done. Bring your kit.”

He had never cried in Starfleet, hadn’t cried since he got the news that he’d never see Joanna again, but that had been in rage. He’s never cried since then, but he cried in the shower that night, splitting his fists open in the shower until the pristine walls were pink and crimson and his hands hurt so badly that he thought he’d never be able to use them again. All the better, he thought in bitter self-loathing, but when he shut off the water and dripped blood across the floor, he hid Joanna’s pictures for the time being and fell asleep on the floor.

The next morning, he woke up in bed, his hands healed and the blood cleaned up from his quarters, as if none of it had ever happened.

*

_But I will preserve the purity of my life and my arts._

*

The red lines on Jim’s back crossed over older scars, the most precise cutting he’d ever done in and out of surgery, tinted red by the rusty smears of fresh blood. Leonard set down his scalpel and watched the thin cuts squeeze out blood for only a moment before he prepared to disinfect them with fresh, soft gauze.

Leonard assumed Jim had always been an impatient man, until the first time they fucked and he took it slow and deliberate, action and reaction preconceived for his own whims. When he’d come into sickbay and pressed the scalpel into Leonard’s hands, he’d known what was expected of him and that there was no questioning him. Jim told him very little about his life before they met, but whatever it had been, it had been bad enough that he bore scars much worse than the ones littering his body. Leonard never asked questions, and Jim never offered answers.

“Stop,” Jim breathed stiffly, reaching around to grab Leonard’s arm. “Let them bleed for now. Just for a minute.”

He obeyed and lowered his hands, the cool gauze in his fingers, leaving him to catch his breath with slow, deep inhales, until his fingers loosened and he closed his eyes, faking his peace with the world for only a moment.

“I’m doing it now, Jim,” he warned, watching the tightening in Jim’s eyebrows, the slightest parting of his lips when he swiped the cool, stinging gauze over his back. “Are you going to let me use a regenerator on these?” he asked unnecessarily, already knowing the answer before Jim leveled a cold look on him while he yanked his shirt on impatiently, ending the discussion. Leonard stole one last look at the surgically neat slashes before Jim’s gold shirt fell into place over them. Fitting, he thought when he left, stiff-shouldered and cold, that aiding Jim’s slow motion self-destruction is the finest thing he’s ever done; the only thing worth immortalizing.

*

_I will not cut for stone, even for patients in whom the disease is manifest; I will leave this operation to be performed by practitioners, specialists in this art._

*

“Can you do the procedure, Bones?” Jim speaks through his tones, and Leonard didn’t miss his then; a little pleading, but mostly brusque and self-assured of his own survival. He had full faith in Leonard in that moment, that he could be saved, that Leonard could do it, that by the force of his will alone would be enough to make it possible. “I need you to do it now.”

He’d never done the operation before, not in those circumstances, not even in a proper operating room. He didn’t even have quite the delicate touch for it, and it was an art of its own, but the plea inherent in his voice was rattling through the marrow of his skeletal cage and so Leonard nodded, thinking of a theory, his instincts, and took out his kit. “You can’t move, Jim,” he told him, and Jim’s blue eyes opened, wide and bright against his pale face, and he couldn’t do it like that, so he added instead, “I’ll put you out for it.”

The light from his emergency pack faltered through the night while he was up to his elbows in Jim’s blood, pausing, scanning for the barbs that spread through his bloodstream, had latched in, were causing his systems to fail, one after another. When the first of the planet’s suns rose, the screen of his tricorder and his face was streaked with blood and he hadn’t slept, fending off the ache of exhaustion threatening to make all his efforts futile. Jim’s will, or his faith in Leonard, hovered around them like a protective charm. Leonard had never done it before, and Jim would have scars until someone took the time to do cosmetic work on the thick knots of tissue on his stomach, his chest, his arms, another by his temple, where Leonard caught it before it entered his brain.

Still, Jim survived it, and when he woke up in sickbay three days later, his smile was knowing, even triumphant, as if it had been the other way around, that it was he who worked through the night to fight for Leonard, who wasn’t sure anymore that it hadn’t been that way all along.

*

_In every house where I come I will enter only for the good of my patients, keeping myself far from all intentional ill-doing and all seduction and especially from the pleasures of love with women or with men, be they free or slaves._

*

Something was wrong with this, he’d known it from the moment they beamed down to the pleasure planet for what Jim had written off as the equivalent of a diplomatic vacation while he flexed the muscle of the Empire over the colonists, reminding them where they belonged in the order of things. Jim was spread out over a few cushions with his hands in a pretty brunette’s hair, holding her mouth in place over his cock and sighing blissfully every so often when she bobbed her head lower.

Leonard didn’t even flinch when a quiet blonde peeled from the wall and pushed him into the cushions beside Jim, though he was there as his doctor, his escort, just a part of the captain’s entourage to keep up appearances while seeing to his health. He ate their food and drank the wine with dinner, the sweet blue wine that left him light-headed and giddy, distracted and inattentive. Then, it was clear that he was meant to enjoy all the same benefits of the captain, while the girl stripped away her robe and straddled his hips, rolling her own down against his erection, an obvious tease.

When he tried to look past her shoulder to Jim, she shook her head and scolded him with soft reprimands, turning his head toward her and pressing her plush lips to his. Panic didn’t set in immediately; it built like an uncomfortable itch he couldn’t reach, some unquantifiable feeling in the center of his chest. When Jim’s brunette opened her eyes, the same frosted green of the Spanish moss in Savannah, and smirked at him, it condensed in his blood and hit him like a blow to the face.

“What the—” he began, but two manicured fingers shoved into his mouth and the blonde rested the blade of a knife against his throat. Just past her, he could see Jim blinking awkwardly at the girl holding a phaser to his chest, her lips still glistening with his come and he too drunk to do a damn thing for himself.

Leonard knew it was a trap, even if he hadn’t placed the feeling from the beginning, and although his father told him sternly never to hurt a Terran woman, he shoved his hands forward and knocked the wind out of her, stumbling and barely coherent. Leonard had attended a single remedial class in the Academy, a course on combat training that Jim taught, and he thought only of that, of Jim breaking a first year cadet’s nose with a clean jerk of his hand, when he broke the girl’s and dodged the phaser blast that incinerated the pillow by his head.

Just as suddenly as it began, it was over, a neat slash across the brunette’s throat, a spray of scarlet across the soft carpets, and Leonard’s ragged breathing when he stared at Uhura, sober and uniformed, her knife gleaming with blood in the low light.

“Next time,” Uhura told them calmly, her eyes locked on Jim, “I’ll leave you to die at the hands of a pair of colonial whores.”

“Thank you,” Leonard mumbled blearily, and stared at Jim, his closed eyes, his blissful, unaware expression, just before he passed out.

*

_All that may come to my knowledge in the exercise of my profession or in daily commerce with men, which ought not to be spread abroad, I will keep secret and will never reveal._

*

The confession slipped out of Chekov while he was working on the kid’s smashed chest, when he was conscious because Chapel had to monitor him. She’d stepped away, confident he would hold together while Leonard finished his stitching and ran the regenerator over him one last time, but Chekov was out of his mind, mumbling under his breath, whispering secrets no one was ever meant to hear but his co-conspirators. Leonard thought nothing of it, but the persistent mumbling stuck with him all day, all night, until he realized what the litany of names had been, what the words meant, just as the clock beside his bed glowed and turned to one AM.

Five past one, Leonard used his medical override on the Captain’s quarters and stopped the assassination attempt before Moreau even managed to draw her knife. His hands were faster than Jim’s for once, and she was unconscious before Jim could land a blow on her. She would sleep for three days before she woke up to her sentencing, but for that moment, right then, Jim and Leonard were alone, huffing for breath and staring one another down.

“How did you know?” Jim demanded with a steel edge in his voice that accepted nothing less than vengeance. “ _How did you know,_ Bones?”

For a moment that stretched eternally with each beat of Leonard’s heart in his chest, he thought of a promise, a broken oath he could hold onto one last time, and Chekov’s secrets, every one of them spilled in front of him when he would have kept them hidden forever. Secrets that belonged to Chekov, to Sulu, to ten other men and women on board and not to him. Minutes later, when Jim showed him the secret to his power, trembling in restrained rage, Leonard watched the officers he’d named, their lifelines next to their names flashing out, disappearing as if they were nothing, never there at all. All of them, except for Moreau’s slow, steady heartbeat, and the synchronized twist and dance of Sulu’s, and Chekov’s, the only ones he could ever save.

*

_If I keep this oath faithfully, may I enjoy my life and practice my art, respected by all men and in all times; but if I swerve from it or violate it, may the reverse be my lot._

*

He hears the chime at his door and he knows who’s waiting for him on the other side, but Leonard knows where this will lead, that there will be more impossible things Jim will ask of him and after five years, he doesn’t want to follow blindly all the time. Some days, some nights, he wants to drink himself sick and doubt what he’s done to himself. Some days. He’s not kidding himself, only _these_ days, when little reminders of the could-have-been creep into his daily life. He isn’t even surprised when the door slides open with a soft beep to indicate that his locks have been overridden.

“I watched your messages,” Jim tells him without announcing himself. He’ll never need to, not as long as the two of them are alive.

“I don’t want to hear it, Jim.” Somehow, Leonard even manages to sound rational, though he wants to smash the glass in his hand against the wall, against Jim’s head, in the face of the bastard who married his ex-wife and assumed his whole life.

“I can kill him, if you want,” he offers and sits in the chair at Leonard’s desk console where he watched his daughter’s video call, the man she called Daddy behind her, his hand tight on her shoulder before he pulled her away. Jim’s fingers brush a thin layer of dust from the keypad. “It would be easy enough. One call and he’ll never be a problem again. One visit and he’ll disappear on his own. One touch of a button and it’ll be like he never existed. Say the word, Bones, and I’ll do it.”

“I should have done it myself,” Leonard spits out, but when he slams down the glass, it’s onto his nightstand, and he sinks onto the bed. “I had the chance, I knew what he was doing, I thought about it.”

“Why didn’t you do it?” Jim asks, tapping his fingers patiently on the desk.

“I’d never killed a man before, Jim.” He’s on his feet again, pacing, tearing his fingers through his hair. “I made an oath, that’s a _promise_.”

There’s a long, silent pause, but Jim’s eyes don’t move from Leonard, tracking his movement across the room until he’s close enough to stop with one movement, a tight hand around his wrist.

“I made _you_ a promise, Bones.”

“Oh, and what the hell was that?” Leonard yanks his hand away, but Jim grabs it again, stronger than Leonard ever was, more powerful than he’ll ever hope to be.

“I told you this would be worth your time. You kept your faith, now let me show you what I can do to make that worth it.”

“There’s nothing _you_ could ever—”

“Your daughter?” Jim says softly, his thumb circling gently around the sensitive cluster of veins on his wrist. “Say it, Bones, and I’ll give you the life you’ve dreamed of for five years now.”

“I’m not—” he starts to protest, but Jim’s eyes are serious, and he’s a monster, the goddamn devil himself, but he has a choice. Damn him, he’s got the choice. He looks down.

Neither Jim’s stare nor his silence falters.

“Do it,” he tells him hoarsely, waits for the world to end around him, and is somehow surprised when it doesn’t, and Jim’s kiss is even nearly gentle with its promise.


End file.
